Grief, Joy, and Handwashing
As I’m sure is common this year, I’ve been thinking about how different this week looks. While it has been a long time since I’ve been able to completely settle into the simplified celebration story, it did generally mean some food, connection, gathering, and consciousness towards gratitude.
And I want to be grateful this year. With everything else going on it feels like a non-negotiable.
**Sidenote: For a meditation on deepening gratitude and its intersection with colonization listen to All My Relations Podcast: Thanks Taking or Thanks Giving for some much-needed consciousness around today’s Day of Mourning.**
I was listening to an old episode of the Breakdances With Wolves Podcast that they recorded back in April when all of this was really ramping up here in the states. They were contemplating what this all meant and how we were dealing. They offered something so profound (and looking back so prophetic), that our survival will rest on whether we can nurture a “heightened sense of humanity.”
And while I have great grief that we haven’t been able to, 6-months later, completely nurture this humanity I found my seed of gratitude. That this year things would look very different and that, perhaps, we could use that awareness as a much-needed perception shift. While doing educational work around marginalized identities I always hope that folks will be able to nurture empathy without the need to have the same experience. But the truth is, as humans, we access compassion differently when we understand the need for it through familiarity.
So take your rest today and set your boundaries. Find joy and connection even if it looks different. Be in gratitude and mourning because the latter deepens the former.
Spend some time with the perspective shift we need to get through this together.
And remember to wash your hands.
[Feeling like I also needed to return to this prayer lovingly offered early on in the pandemic from Dori Midnight. Shared in deep gratitude with her permission and encouragement. Sinking into the ritual, grounding, and connection with great reverence. Full text can be read on her website: https://dorimidnight.com/uncategorized/wash-your-hands/#]
